There Is Hope For Nintendo’s Unlocalized DS Games Yet

The Nintendo DS has a vast library of first-party Nintendo games developed for it. Excellent games, some of which have yet to be released outside of Japan. Soma Bringer, Tomodachi Collection and Jet Impulse come to mind off the top of my head.

While none of these titles were specifically named, some of them may see the light of day yet, according to Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata.

Speaking with investors, Iwata stated that Nintendo are carefully considering how to handle the transition from Nintendo DS to Nintendo 3DS. While the company must dedicate resources to ensuring a solid line-up of 3DS games, the current large installed base of the DS and DSi cannot be ignored.

One way to take advantage of the current DS audience is to release games in territories that haven’t received them yet, Iwata feels. The original Animal Crossing on Gamecube is one such example. It wasn’t planned for localization until Nintendo’s localization branches evaluated the title and felt it could appeal to an overseas audience.

"Some software has already proved its marketability in Japan but is still not available in the overseas’ markets, and for some software titles, our localization teams are currently spending time to localize them," Iwata said to investors.

"Taking advantage of such software may be one of the ways to deal with your question about the transitional period from Nintendo DS to Nintendo 3DS," he concluded.

Food for thought:

Keep in mind that the less text a game has, the easier it is to justify localizing it. This could potentially put games like Soma Bringer, which are chock-full of text, at the very bottom of the list.

As someone who’s beaten Soma Bringer it’s not nearly as bad as you’re making it out to be

But honestly, I’m pretty sure the Soma Bringer ship has sailed anyway. Most people who have an interest in the game have already played the fully English patched version. Not that I wouldn’t buy it, because it was an excellent game, but I can’t speak for everyone else :l

Not me personally. I prefer to buy my titles. I’m just saying that a translation has been available for over 2 years now, it’s a little late for Nintendo to express interest in bringing over that particular title.

For the record I own a Japanese copy of the game, but I did download the English version when the patch was finished. I would probably buy the US version again, just so I could play it co-op(the best way to play that game) with friends who are playing that one too.

SolidusSnake

…You support literacy? Oh wait, I already know the answer

SolidusSnake

I can.

Phlo

Oh, no! A game with lots of plot? What if it even has an enjoyable story? Anyway, thanks for the warning!

No, he’s just saying that not everyone cares about voice-acting in every game that they play, and your constant generalizations about people’s tastes based on what you like or dislike are starting to annoy other commenters.

(try to be more respectful of other people’s tastes. This is a community, after all)

I know it’s probably difficult for you, but you really need to learn not to be narrow minded. I love voice acting, I’m sure many others do, but let’s take Phoenix Wright for instance, it was originally on the GBA now ported to DS, no voice acting, but the series has some of the best stories, clever writing, most interesting chars. It would be a pity if you skip these games just because it doesn’t have voices. And Nier (yes, not the million seller FF13) has some parts in the form of novellas where you just read, it brought people to tears and just transport you to another world. I would take that any day over FF13’s “voicing acting”.

I never said that I wouldnt play a game that lacked voice acting. Golden Sun lacks voice acting and Imma still play it, Pokemon lacks voice acting, and I still play it. I just value voice acting greatly.

Aoshi00

Then don’t make blanket statements that games w/ voice acting are necessarily good or vice versa. They are not mutually exclusive. Your tone has always been if there is no full voice acting it’s not worth playing. Based on your logic, why would people want to play Golden Sun? If a game is good, why would you worry about if there’s voice acting in it. FF7,8,9 were all great, they were all mutes, and Chrono Trigger too (the main char actually did not speak because you assumed the role). I also highly value voice acting, that’s why I like FFX so much (Eng wasn’t as good as Jpn but still good IMO), but it’s not be all or end all.

I think you are twisting my words. A game is *more* good when it includes voice acting. A game is *less* good when it doesnt include voice acting. So essentially a game can still be good with or without voice acting, its just that voice acting improves the goodness of a game, or essentially makes it *gooder*.

My logic would state that people would be able to enjoy those games…if they are good…thus the lack of voice acting should not act as a provision to prohibit one from playing and enjoying a game.

Aoshi00

“Why would people want to read tomes of text?” I think those are your words and you’ve repeated them quite enough. Not everything is better w/ voices. The Harry Potter movies might have high budget CG, acting, etc. But some might say the original books are much better than the movies, even though there’s just text, the visual and sound are in your mind, they could be even more vivid. The FF13 novellas was much better than the game even though there was no CG or voice acting that go w/ them.

Exkaiser

“A game is *more* good when it includes voice acting.” Tell that to Baten Kaitos. Ugh…..

@Exkaiser Of the gamecube RPG’s that I played Baten Kaitos was my favorite one and first, I guess contemporary console RPG. I thought the Voice Acting was fantastic, the battle quotes were awesome.

Exkaiser

“I thought the Voice Acting was fantastic.”

D-did you play the same Baten Kaitos I did? The voice acting was so awful that I actually quit playing for a while. When I got back, I turned them off. While the party members were subpar at worst (I feel that Lyude was the weakest of them), the NPCs were completely terrible.

The trailer for the game was better-acted than the game itself- not that it wasn’t kind of awkward in some spots.

@Exkaiser You thought it was that terrible? Maybe because it was my first experience playing an RPG with voice acting or something, it was in 2005/6 when I played it though. Ive been meaning to replay it, so maybe it isnt as glorious as I thought it was when I played it oh so long ago.

Well I made an inaccurate assumption, please forgive me, especially if I caused an any dissatisfaction.

Kris

Fair enough. Still, when someone says “I really want to play this game,” don’t respond with “but it’s bad because it’s doing what it tries to do.” I mean, if I play a DS RPG, I don’t expect voice acting, I expect an RPG. I mean, complaining about written text in an RPG is like complaining about beef in your steak.

Yusaku_Matsuda70s

Ha ha, I had a good laugh imagining your servbot avatar yelling those words out with its funny lego face and arms spazzing… even though servbot doesn’t speak. XD

Exkaiser

Whatchu mean Servbots don’t speak?

…Ah, now I want to get back to my current Legends 2 playthrough.

Yusaku_Matsuda70s

They have dialogue, sure, but they make mousy noises that sound like gibberish to me. :S

Exkaiser

They sound pretty clear to me, even if they are really high-pitched. : X

There is nothing stopping Nintendo from localizing those as part of a broader strategy to keep the DS, which will have a larger userbase than 3DS for years, as a viable option.

Joanna

That’s true, but I suspect that if they are going to bring something over it will be their own titles and maybe DQVI like Spencer hinted. If I ran a game company, I would give preference to my own titles as well.I’d love to see LA3…Aksys or XSEED, are you listening? Pretty Please with a cherry on top?

Thiefofhearts

They just need to be exclusives. Baten Kaitos 2 and Tales of Phantasia were both developed and published by Namco in Japan, but Nintendo did release them here.

Everytime I go to gamespot that game always shows up on the page. it would be nice if I had the chance to play it

MemeticRichard

It’s a chance best left passed up.

MemeticRichard

You DO NOT want Sigma Harmonics here, TRUST ME…

That game is a stain on the NDS’ library. An ugly stain that even Mr. Clean can’t wipe up… Calling it crap would be an insult to crap.

SolidusSnake

What’s so bad about it? Aside from being a Squeenix game, of course.

MemeticRichard

One sentence will tell you everything: It’s made by the Dirge of Cerberus team.Or, do you want me to go into further detail? Like annoying puzzle elements, irritating fetch quests, overly complicated character management system, and a completely broken battle system that fails in every aspect? What else… It’s also short as all hell. Falsely advertised. Etc etc.

SolidusSnake

“One sentence will tell you everything: It’s made by the Dirge of Cerberus team.”

Cool music though. Guess I’ll just stick to listening to the soundtrack and avoiding the game itself.

Aoshi00

It seems that Hamauzu kept having bad luck of being assigned to compose soundtracks for some of the worst games ever (Sigma Harmonics, FF13), it’s like his amazing talent just being squandered, no wonder that guy quit right after that.. I imagine the meeting would be like this,Square guy 1: “man, the game is really bad.. can’t we do something about it?”Square guy 2: “um… how about getting Hamauzu do the music?”

MemeticRichard

=_= FF13 is NOT a bad game.

Just an extraordinarily controversial one lol.

Aoshi00

I swear you’re like my evil twin or something, always speaking what’s on my mind lol.. yea, every once in a while you have people saying they want to play Sigma Harmonics, no they don’t… that’s the sorriest $60 I’ve spent importing anything ever.. Definitely false advertising, horrible piece of… people bought it from fire sale for $10 and they still think they wasted money..

The thing I hate about that game is that it reminded me how much Shadow Dragon just didn’t need to exist. There was already a remake of Fire Emblem in the original version of Monshou no Nazo, it’s silly that they broke it back up into 2 games again for the DS remake.

That’s encouraging, but keep in mind, Nintendo also owns the domain name for “mother3.com”. For what that’s worth.

Joanna

Gah, reading these comments is like a roller coaster. One brings me up, and another crashes me down. I still hoping we get XenoBlade since it’s still too early to give up all hope.

gatotsu911

@Joanna: Believe me, I’m praying to get Xenoblade too, and for the moment I am cautiously optimistic. I should mention that I tested out potential URLs for several other unlocalized Nintendo games, and mother3.com was the only one that NoA had actually registered. (Sort of – “disasterdayofcrisis.com” was registered, but checkdomain.com listed the owner as anonymous.) “captainrainbow.com”, “somabringer.com”, and “archaicsealedheart.com”, among others, were not registered. As far as I can tell this means one of three things: 1) Nintendo of America is unusually worried about someone grabbing these particular domain names. For some reason. 2) Nintendo have very recently decided that they’ll just register the domain for every new game they release, regardless of their plans to localize it, or 3) Nintendo is planning to localize Xenoblade and The Last Story. In all honesty, I’d wager that the last of these is the most plausible explanation.

Fredrik

Indeed. While this is nice, I would rather have an official word that Nintendo gonna localize the Wii games Xenoblade and The Last Story.

puchinri

I hope they do bring Soma Bringer over though. I was looking at vids of it again last week and reminded of how much I want it.

DlanorKnox

A terrific English patch of Soma Bringer exists if you’re willing to emulate or use a flash cart to play it.

puchinri

Oh, well that is something to consider. Thanks for the information!
Would you happen to have a link or remember the name of the site?
Or is it easy to find in a google search?

Maybe to give the third parties room to sell their games here or in Euro without the threat of Nintendo titles selling like hot cakes causing people to avoid looking at those games?

malek86

Doubtful. Games such as these would not attract a big audience anyway.

Pichi

I think Nintendo likes to play safe too much. They rather a profit than a lost, so rather go for the “safer” Mario, Zelda, etc titles then new IPs and such.

Joanna

To add to Pichi: Over-saturation. There were lots of DS games coming out the last two years (maybe even three years, depending on how much you consider too much) and even if title X and Y were theoretically marketable, the market conditions were probably too hostile because of the sheer over-saturation. Now, since the 3DS has been confirmed, DS releases are slowly dying down and it would make it easier for people to notice whatever games Nintendo considered before. Of course, there is also the problem of people losing interest in DS games, but Iwata seems to at least think the install base is big enough to off-set this.

Thiefofhearts

Well, what about the games that just haven’t come to the US, like the Last Window?

Not that I own a DS, but what did they ruin in it? I’m guessing it doesn’t have the CGI cutscenes. What else is different?

MemeticRichard

No soul, is the best way to put it. Everything about the game feels really cheap – almost like…no, not almost, definitely is the word, like movie tie-in games! It feels like a quick & dirty way to get Xenosaga on the DS, and it just feels really lifeless as a whole.

Testament to that, is that it’s glitchy as all hell.

Phoenix_Apollo

I would be fine without it mostly, except for the fact that Episode III continues from the DS events (don’t the credits from the DS game even mention Episode III?).

Plus, hey, if it’s better than Episode II, then I’m all for it. Especially if it combines the storylines instead of leaving us with that cliffhanger from Episode I.

So many unlocalized DS games I’d love to see released outside of Japan. As for Nintendo published ones Soma Bringer and ASH are the ones I want most but I don’t think it’ll ever happen. We’ll probably get Tomodachi Collection sooner or later though.

Yer!!!!! Come On Down Blood Of Bahamut.Lookin 4ward now.2 await the game in my many,many sleepless nights (caused by exciment 4 this game!!!!)

Aoshi00

I think that’s another stinker from S-E like Sigma Harmonics, *checks Amazon Jpn*, 2.5 out of 5 stars from 34 user reviews, and it costs 690 yen right now. Sometimes we should be thankful some games don’t come here.

Joanna

Oh Ishaan, don’t tease me so! You’re getting up hopes up for ASH, Soma Bringer, and Last Window (US). I’d love to see ASH in particular since it’s a Sakaguchi game and it looks really fun, while Last Window is already available in English (albeit at a higher price for us importers) and Soma Bringer looks great too but I prefer the SRPG-like combat of ASH to hack-and-slash ARPG (not that it’s bad, just my personal preference). It would be awesome to have all three though. >:)

edit: gah, I forgot about Fire Emblem. It needs to be localized! It’s already an established franchise here! Come on, Nintendo! Also wonder if the first Layton game in the second trilogy will be localized by Nintendo or L5.

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